Did the South’s failure to ban letters of marque allowing privateers to plunder Yankee ships contribute to the Confederacy’s reputation as a rogue nation?
The answer is - perhaps -but no more so than did Elizabeth I’s decision to commission her “sea dogs,” Raleigh and Drake, turn England into a rogue state in the eyes of the Spanish. However, Elizabeth’s high jinx on the seas eventually brought her victory - an outcome that eluded the South.
Charleston investors subscribed to shares in the privateer Sallie in defiance, of course, to the United States signatory acceptance of the Treaty of Paris, 1856 - an international treaty that outlawed letters of marque. Yet, after firing on Fort Sumter, what more harm could result from trouncing on an international agreement?
Exactly 148 years ago this week, October, 1861, the Confederate privateer Sallie made her run out of the wide-mouthed Edisto, tacked toward Botony Bay Island, and beat to windward and blue water. With lapels flapping, Captain Henry S. Lebby stood at the wheel of the sleek, 170 ton clipper fitted for blockade running and privateering. His all-Charleston, 40-man crew looked smart on deck with cutlasses.
Four months was all it’d taken to finance the purchase of this lightning-fast ship and outfit her with one cannon in her bow. The Charleston Courier ran ads in June, 1861, calling for investors to buy shares in the great venture of plundering Union commerce in the south Atlantic. In 1861 the mood of many Charlestonians was one of thrill and danger.
Local diarists recorded a romantic tension among the young bloods during the age of secession  - a daring nonchalance of uniformed gallants taking liberties with rich men’s daughters. Along with an air of amour there was the fever of speculation as ship owners overnight became daring privateers.
Sallie was in the expert hands of Henry Lebby, a Charlestonian who’d skippered cotton-laden frigates between here and Liverpool. Some historians have suggested that it was wartime profiteering that motivated Charlestonians who went to sea as privateers and blockade runners. However, think of it as a clever free market solution for a fledgling nation with no navy.
At no cost to the Confederacy Charlestonians were putting ships with excellent crews to sea with the mission of disrupting enemy commerce. The investors did not think of themselves as agents of pirates because the South’s government in Richmond had issued letters of marque to the privateer owners.
Remember Charlestonians never had any qualms about consorting with pirates during colonial times.
The story of the privateer Sallie is just one of the ripping, seagoing yarns spun by William Morrison Robinson, Jr., in his book, The Confederate Privateers, published by Yale University Press in 1928. What makes the tale of the Sallie so tantalizing is that she weaved and bobbed amidst Yankee merchant ships like a coyote through a herd of deer. And she came off clean with her conquests, rewarding her investors handsomely and never tasted the toxin of Union revenge. There were back slaps, knowing winks, and much hurrahing on the East Bay wharves as the Sallie was sighted crossing the bar - her shallow draft dragging bottom on Thursday, December 5 low tide - Union pursuers in her wake. Sallie returned to port 57 days after slipping quietly out of the mouth of the Edisto to start her nautical adventure.
Sleek and saucy Sallie took the Granada of Portland, Maine, on Sunday, October 12 — less than a week after putting to sea. According to William M. Robinson, Granada was hauling sugar, honey, mahogany, and cedar from Cuba to New York. Captain Lebby put Lieutenant Edwin Bryant of Charleston with six of Sallie’s best men on the prize ship Granada and dispatched the conquest to Charleston.
Likely it was drinks on the house at the Mills and Charleston Hotel bars as Sallie’s investors celebrated their good fortune. Lieutenant Bryant no doubt recounted how Lebby sighted the H.M.S. Active just after he’d highjacked Granada. Lebby ordered the Confederate flag to be unfurled at the last minute and the British vessel sailed on - choosing not to intervene in the unfolding high seas incident.
When Lebby overtook yet another English merchant schooner, the Greyhound, he signaled a request that he wished to send his captive Yankees aboard Greyhound since that ship was bound for New York. Quickly the sailors from Maine were ferried to the Greyhound, and a week later they had tales of adventure with which to regale their chagrined shipping employer in Portland.
On Thursday afternoon, October 17, Sallie’s watch spied the hermaphrodite brig Betsey Ames out of Wells, Maine. She was overhauled and taken easily, as no merchant captain desired a privateer to “hull” him with a 12-pound shot. Betsey Ames was richly laden with a cargo of machinery, boilers, mixed vegetables, and a host of other marketable plunder. Lieutenant Tolle and a few of Sallie’s crew sailed the Betsy back to Charleston - where again the jubilant investors celebrated with more rounds of drinks. War makes one woman a widow and another the wife of a millionaire!
On Halloween eve, Thursday, October 31, Sallie was running silent, lights doused in the pitch black off Georgia’s coast when the faint image of another ship appeared off her starboard bow. The mammoth ship, also running without lights, was a heavily-armed Union frigate on blockade duty. Lebby realized that the frigate’s guns could lift the Sallie out of the water with just one fiery broadside if he were spotted.
For what seemed an interminable number of minutes the Sallie paralleled the dreaded enemy ship. The two hulls were running so close that Sallie’s crew distinctly heard the frigate’s bell and the watchman cry out “All’s well.” Cool as November, Lebby tacked his schooner perpendicular to the frigate and hightailed out of this dangerous rendezvous, for the Union pledged the fate of the noose to all privateers.
The Sallie headed for home and had to run for her life as she was chased into the harbor by a fleet of Union ships. Captain Lebby cashed in the prizes with John Fraser and Company of 19 Exchange Street. Fraser was affiliated with Fraser, Trenholm and Company, the Charleston maritime connection in Liverpool. Sallie’s crew was paid off, the schooner was sold, and the investors reaped many times their original outlay.

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. Visit his Web site at www.historyslostmoments.com.)